How do anti-plagiarism detectors and programs work to find exact wordings from other sources and determine that they aren’t just coincidence?
In: Technology
The system is able to detect commonly quoted authors, definitions, etc. People will literally rip off entire sections from source materials and put it in word for word in their papers. Put quotes around it and cite your work and you are totally fine. If you are writing about abortion, many sentences will be very similar across the spectrum because the subject has been talked to death. Similar sentence is OK but exactly the same is very suspect. It doesn’t report a ‘pass/fail’, it gives the professor a percentage of similarity and it is up to them to decide whether you plagiarized. I used turnitin for some philosophy classes I took a few years ago, we were talking about very well trodden subjects and my arguments were not particularly unique or insightful and my papers were ~5% similar to other papers. When I have talked to professors who have nailed people for plagiarism they have told me whole paragraphs were wholesale copied. They can tell when you were just being to close to the source material. The more you read another author the more you will adopt their way of talking/writing and it is a skill to take their ideas and describe them from your perspective. Depending on who is teaching you, while you might not get nailed for plagiarism but you may get a bad grade on the paper. When you are talking about the difference between a graduate school writer and an undergrad writer, this skill is one of the defining factors between those two cohorts of students.
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